He is if you believe this report from the Daily News, anyway. Which, yes, is a pretty big caveat — this could very well just be a big bluff communicated to a newspaper which has done a great job over the years carrying the anti-PED crowd’s water — but we gotta take reports at face value until we have reason not to.

The report: that Bud Selig is prepared to invoke his powers to “preserve the integrity of the game” in order to keep Alex Rodriguez off the field even if he appeals his discipline. In other words: Selig will essentially void the part of the Joint Drug Agreement that allows players to play pending appeal and suspend him summarily.

Which is absolute madness, of course.

Even if A-Rod has done everything of which he is accused, even if he is the biggest PED user in the history of PED users, even if he has attempted to interfere with MLB’s investigation, he is still owed due process. Everyone is. The Joint Drug Agreement covers all of those offenses, even the interference with an investigation thing. It says that the JDA is the sole basis of discipline in matters arising out of PEDs. To deny a player his appeal rights under that agreement would be a shameful abuse of power, even when the player involved happens to be unpopular. The least of my brothers, and such.

At some point we have to ask ourselves how much of Major League Baseball’s investigation and subsequent discipline of Alex Rodriguez is about penalizing a player for his bad acts and how much of it is about kicking an unliked and unwanted player — and a player who makes an awful lot of money — out of the game simply because it would make most people feel good.

Of course, maybe it doesn’t go this far. Maybe the point of this is to simply make Bud Selig look tough. After all, this very question — “Is Bud Selig going too far to fight the drug users?!” — serves his legacy interests very, very well.